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FRIDAY, May 18, 2012 — A retired Columbia University psychologist who promoted therapy to cure homosexuality has reversed his stance.

Psychologist Robert L. Spitzer, 79, has long supported therapy to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, as promoted in a study he published in 2001. But April 11, he retracted the study.

"In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct," he said in the most-recent issue of The American Prospect magazine. "The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more." Spitzer also wrote an apologetic letter for the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the journal in which it originally appeared.

Spitzer's study has been a political lightning rod for decades. Socially conservative groups have turned to it as evidence that homosexuality is a choice; gay support groups argue that the study is faulty. Thursday, the World Health Organization report called the therapy a "serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people." Most major medical organizations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association oppose this type of conversion therapy.

Many in the psychology community as well as gay activists believe it's about time that the paper was debunked. "Dr. Robert Spitzer's apology for backing the 'cure' for homosexuality comes about 3 decades too late," wrote clinical psychologist Patricia Farrell on Twitter. "The damage has been done."

Wayne Besen, author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth told the Huffington Post: "Spitzer just kicked out the final leg from the stool on which the proponents of 'ex-gay' therapy based their already shaky claims of success."

To conduct the study, Spitzer recruited 200 men and women from ex-gay therapy centers around the country and interviewed them on the phone about their feelings before and after their conversions. He rated their answers on a scale. "The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year,” his paper found, based on a comparison of the patients' experiences before and after therapy.

His research was presented at a psychiatry meeting in 2001.

Several psychologists argued that the paper was filled with holes. For one, it included many supporters of conversion therapy. Second, many of the subjects had not seen a professional therapist but rather a church counselor. Third, patients' self-reports, especially years after their experiences, are often inaccurate.

When it was published two years later in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, it was accompanied by commentary that denounced it as incorrect and unethical because it could increase prejudice against gays.

Though Spitzer stated in interviews that the study did not imply that homosexuality was a choice, that didn't stop anti-gay activists from using it for that purpose, according to an article in The New York Times.

Before the study was released, Spitzer was considered a hero by the gay community. As a junior member on an American Psychiatric Association committee to help rewrite the field's diagnostic manual in 1973, he led the charge to remove homosexuality from a list of disorders.

"Dr. Spitzer’s research was particularly harmful because he was the only non-socially conservative scientist to produce a study claiming some people could 'pray away the gay,'" an article on the website LBGTNation says.

The retired Spitzer has Parkinson's disease. In his letter, he explained that the conversion-therapy study was his only professional regret. "I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy," he writes. "I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works..."

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